The Secret that is Left
by Story Please
Summary: Just a mini fic that adds to my left-handed Snape lore.


Author's Note: A mini fic that adds a bit onto my Left-Handed Snape Headcanon, which you will have to pull from my cold, dead hands because I love it _that_ much.

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 **The Secret that is Left**

He knows it's wrong, but he still waits until his father is sleeping off his drink and his mother has passed out on the couch, the bottle of Valium lying on the end-table. He can't stop himself. He does it again.

He's like a ghost as he slips his hand into his mother's pocket and pulls out her wand. She's so far gone, she probably wouldn't notice if he slapped her face with it, but he takes no chances.

He tiptoes down into the root cellar, pushing a sack of old potatoes against the door. It won't give him much time if someone were to wake up and try to come in after him, but it will give him enough time to pretend that he's doing something very different than what he aims to do.

There's an old three-legged table in the back, one side held up by a couple empty cans of powdered milk, and on top of that, Severus has set up a number of objects. There's a cracked cup, a penny, and a small stone, one he nicked from his mother's Gobstones bag. He wonders if maybe this stone will give him more of a chance of success. It's from _there_. From _Hogwarts_. From the magical place he yearns to be, not the squalid reality where he currently resides. Placing the wand in his right hand, just like his mother always does when his father is gone at the pub (or, though less and less, at the mill), he focuses intently and thinks _WINGARDIUM LEVIOSA_ as hard as he can.

Nothing happens.

It's to be expected, especially since he's only eight years old and has had no formal training. But he's read the books, the ones his mother hid in his closet behind the false wall.

The ones she thinks he knows nothing about.

Though there are some big words and he's fairly certain that he's mispronouncing _leviosa_ , he's still disappointed.

After a couple of other attempts, he drops the wand on the table and pulls his hair back behind his ears. It's greasy and stringy on his neck and he hates the feeling, wishing for the millionth time that his mother would let him cut it short or that his father would at least let him tie it up without beating him and referring to him as a "fairy."

His knee bumps the table and the cans slip, causing everything to fall, including the wand, which rolls off the table towards the dusty floor. Severus gasps and knows in that moment that if he cannot catch it, his mother will find out what he has done, no matter how well he cleans her wand before putting it back. She has been beaten down by life, but her eyes are still keen and hard, like a bird of prey.

Mindlessly, he reaches for it, his eyes squinting with concentration until they close completely and he is left groping blindly through the air for it, which he realizes is a stupid thing to do.

But it _works_.

His fingers close around the length of his mother's wand at the same moment that his eyes open and a strange feeling like a current of warm electricity pulses through his arm and into his chest.

He holds his mother's wand with his left hand, the hand his mother has swatted him for using it at the dinner table until he stopped to avoid the pain, the one that his father referred to as the "shite hand" when Severus had attempted writing with it.

"It's just proof of 'is _wrongness_ , innit, Eileen?" Tobias Snape would snarl, his yellowed teeth jagged and terrifying as he pointed accusingly at his son.

So Severus had focused all of his energy on using his right hand. He wanted to be good, to be accepted, to be loved so _badly_ that his teeth ached. He'd thought that if he just changed this _one, stupid thing_ , perhaps they'd treat him differently; they'd tell him that they'd loved him all along, and that his dunderheaded insistence upon using his left hand had been the only reason they'd been forced to behave with such cruelty.

He is beginning to realize this childish hope for the lie that it is, but a part of him still refuses to let go, and his heart both swells with joy and drops with fear when he realises that he _can_ do magic, but it's with the very hand that he's tried so hard to stop using unless he's all alone.

But there will be time to think of that later.

" _Wingardium Leviosa_!" Severus says, his voice so full of joy, it's almost a song on his lips, and the half-collapsed table floats into the air as though it is weightless.

Severus points at the cans and they join the table in the air and as he moves the wand back and forth; they dance at his command and he feels as though the other remaining childish wish, the one that tells him that when he finally gets to Hogwarts, when he finally becomes a real wizard, that he will be free, is not just a childish wish after all.

Years later, when his mother takes him to Ollivander's shop, he will try many wands in his right hand under his mother's watchful eye, but Ollivander will give him a knowing look and take him into the back, handing him the ebony length of wood that will become his lifelong conduit for the magic that pulses in his very blood.

"Here, young Severus, try this one," Ollivander says, pressing it into his left hand with a knowing look, "I believe that you, more than any I've seen today, will need it."


End file.
